Empire and Arab Indology

Abstract

This article focuses on the Chouf-born poet, lawyer and translator Wadiʿ al-Bustani (1888–1954), who called himself a “Lebanese Palestinian,” as he moves from Beirut, to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. The first to translate Tagore into Arabic after a visit to his Santiniketan in 1916, Bustani spent his life annotating and translating into Arabic the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala . Alongside his self-professed and self-funded philological project, Bustani was one of the most important poets and lawyers in British Mandate Palestine, inspiring protest with his verse and litigating against colonial land policies. By focusing on Bustani's relation to British imperial culture, his political commitments in Palestine, and the contours of his indological project, this article uncovers a new history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame, long hidden in the many narrations of orientalism's travel and Palestine's colonization.